This specification relates to activity-based segmentation of user histories.
The Internet provides access to a wide variety of resources, for example, video or audio files, web pages for particular subjects, book articles, and news articles. The World Wide Web (the web) is large and complex. In the process of conducting research on a topic of interest, a user may navigate the web and in doing so will often browse through many resources.
Often users research a particular topic (or topics) over a series of days or even weeks, and do so concurrently without knowledge of other users' research findings. The act of gathering information for a particular topic, or one or more related topics, is referred to as a “task.” In general, a task encompasses the acts of issuing queries and selecting (and not selecting) resources that a search engine determines to be responsive to the queries. A task generally relates to one or more related topics, and a user may be engaged in multiple tasks. For example, assume a user, over the course of several days or weeks, is planning a trip to Kenya and is also planning a child's summer. For each task—the Kenya trip and the children's summer activities—the user issues queries and selects resources that map into multiple sessions over the several days or weeks. Likewise, each task may relate one or more topics, e.g., horseback riding and canoeing for the summer activities, and flights, hotels, safaris and immunizations for the Kenya trip.
Typical web browsers can retain the user's browser history. In addition to these client based histories, the user can also use server or cloud based services (e.g., Google Web History). Reviewing web histories enables the user to recall particular resources that the user may have found to be very informative for a particular topic. However, such chronological histories provide a list of user actions in the order they occurred, and do not partition the histories by task.